Friday, 13 September 2013

NOIR CANADIANA

The Pea Gravel Heist

The night fell like a bent boxer. As black,
oppressive and smothering as the stage curtain of a play that closes on opening
night. I made sure the lights were out, that we stayed away from the windows,
kept our voices down and kept our cigarettes cupped in the palms of our hands.
There was work to be done.

I was back in Edmonton, a harsh winter burg that hadn’t
been sorry to see the last of me 20 years ago. I’ve since bugged out of worse
places, spattered with bad blood and a crumpled one-way ticket in my coat. I’ve
snuck my shadow out of some nice towns too. I’d been summoned north by a moll I
could never quite shake, blonde and bosomy with gams I like to look at. Her
wit’s snappier than the gum she chews and sharper than her nails. Her handle is
Ann, Ann Fatale. As for me, the name’s Danger, Geoff Danger. I’m a fixer, a
freelancer. You don’t ever want to have to deal with the likes of me, but if
you do, you’ll want me on your side. Trust me on that.

Insurance lightning is normally a simple
process. You need jerrycans of gasoline and plastic garbage bins. One or two
paper matches. Foom! Issue solved. Ann Fatale said she had some torches, would
I come up? Turned out the torches weren’t jobs, they were actual torches from
the five and dime. Made in China.
Citronella candles. Seemed their bases were too small to be stable. She
envisioned them resting in terracotta dishes with their flimsy bases weighted
down by gravel, pea gravel. They’d look nice on the backyard patio during the
evenings. Keep the bugs away. Trouble was Ann Fatale had no gravel. Gravel was
my gig. That’s what I signed on for. A pea gravel heist.

Doctors are a lot like the heat.
Everything’s copasetic until you encounter them and they examine you too closely.
Suddenly everything’s wrong and you’re looking to escape a diagnosis or
handcuffs. A doctor lives one block over from Ann Fatale, four garage doors
down the alley. Nobody in the neighbourhood likes the doctor. I get that and I
know back alleys like the back of my hand. Seems doctor had a substantial pile
of pea gravel along side of his garage. Unused. That afternoon I did a recon,
la-di-dah, walking a borrowed dog with bad hips, scanning, scoping and picking
up after the dog. It seemed easy enough. All I’d need was a child’s beach sand
bucket, a spade, 25 seconds and the cover of darkness.

It was time. “All right,” I said, “let’s
go.”

Ann Fatale took the old dog. I carried the
bucket and spade. We slipped through the back gate and the entire alley was lit
up by motion lights. Our shadows stretched north to Fort
McMurray and south to Calgary, west
to Vancouver and east to Regina. But there were no guards, no guns.
Security lights are like car alarms, ignored by everyone.

“What do you think?” she asked tensely.

“I’m going in,” I replied tersely. “Set
your watch. If I’m not back in 25 seconds get out of here.”

Later, during our debrief, surrounded by lit
citronella candles that weren’t going anywhere, I thought maybe it was good to
have an accomplice, the right time to have a partner in crime. I decided maybe
I wasn’t going anywhere either.